


Thank You For the Music

by Joe_Reaves



Category: Empire Records (1995)
Genre: Established Relationship, Introspection, M/M, Music
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-10
Updated: 2010-04-10
Packaged: 2017-10-08 20:36:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/79296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Joe_Reaves/pseuds/Joe_Reaves
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Joe thinks about his life in music.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thank You For the Music

It's AJ's twenty-first today. The gang are all inside celebrating, but I needed a break so I'm out here on the swing with a bottle of beer. They're all so young and happy and while I normally enjoy their energy, right now it's just annoying as hell. Sometimes I just want adult company, someone to talk to who understands where I'm coming from.

I don't think any of the kids have really thought about it, but I'm the same age as Empire Records. Both of us were 'born' in 1959. That means I was ten years old when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Thinking about that always makes me smile.

1969 was a good year. It was the year of Woodstock, the year I first realised I wanted to be a musician. Of course it was also the year I decided I wanted to be an astronaut, but I think everyone wanted that for a while. My father wasn't interested but my grandfather and I sat in his front room and watched it as it happened on his tiny black and white television. Looking at the pictures now, they look so grainy, but back then it was like a miracle. Everything seemed different the day after – like walking on the moon meant anything was possible. I told my grandfather that and he just hugged me and told me to keep believing that. That was the year he bought me my first drum kit. He said I should concentrate on my music and not go gallivanting off in space where he couldn't keep an eye on me.

Everything seemed to go downhill from there. It was 1970 and to a music obsessed wannabe astronaut it seemed like the world was ending. The Beatles broke up and Jimi Hendrix died. Nothing was ever going to be the same again. My father was drinking more and more often, and one night he came home and smashed my drums to pieces. Grandfather bought me another set and I kept them at his place, but it wasn't the same. Together we held our breath as Jim Lovell struggled to bring his crew home in a damaged ship. Everything was still possible, but the world wasn't as bright and shiny as Armstrong had made it seem. I stopped wanting to be Neil and focussed on Jim instead. Overcoming everything and achieving the impossible, against the odds.

Despite everything the next couple of years weren't so bad. Sure Jim Morrison died, terrorists attacked the Olympics, and American Pie seemed to be the title track in the soundtrack of our lives, but at the end of 1972, Elvis held a series of concerts at Madison Square Garden. They sold out within twenty-four hours, but grandfather drove up there and queued for hours to get tickets. Dad didn't want me to go but my grandfather stood his ground and matched him shout for shout. So we went. I don't have the words to describe it. The music, the crowds, the atmosphere. I was walking on air when the concert ended and talked about nothing else for weeks. Now I knew I wanted to be a musician and nothing was going to stop me.

The early seventies were the time I came of age and it seemed like the world of music was as confused as I was. It was a hodgepodge of rock and roll, country, rock, the end of the hippy movement, the beginning of something new. Jesus Christ Superstar vied with Elton John and Motown. Then in 1974, something was born that influenced me more than it appears. No, not Lucas, although he was born in 1974; Punk. My real love was still rock, but punk was about rebelling, about saying screw the rules, I'm going to do what I want and who cares what you think. The fact that the birth of punk was marked with Patti Smith's 'Hey Joe' is purely coincidental. I stopped listening to my father's drunken rampages, stopped caring what he thought. I didn't quit school or anything quite that radical – partly because it would have disappointed my grandfather, but mainly because I knew that an education was important, that it would help me in the future. I stayed in school for me, not for anyone else. I was no longer working to get grades my father would be proud of; I knew it didn't matter what I did, because he would never be proud. I did it for me and in its own way that was part of my rebellion.

I stayed at school. I played with my band. I fought with my father. Same old pattern for the next three years. 1977. The year I turned eighteen. The year the world ended...

I got home from school and the light was blinking on the answer phone. Dad was passed out drunk on the couch so I hit play. It was the hospital. Grandfather had collapsed. I left dad a note and rushed to the ER. He was propped up in bed in a private room, so pale and fragile looking. He smiled when he saw me though and I went and sat on the bed next to him. He had a bad heart, he said, and he wasn't going to be around much longer. I told him I loved him and he told me how proud he was of me. Then he picked up his watch from the table and gave it to me. He said his father had given it to him for his eighteenth birthday. He wanted me to have it, to remember how proud he was of me, and to never stop believing that anything was possible if you wanted it enough.

A few days later he died and I packed my drum kit and some clothes in the back of my friend's van. We left school and took our band on the road. Less than a month after that Elvis died and the world of music changed forever, too.

We toured for about three years. Three long years of breaking the rules, drink, drugs, girls.... Gigs all over the place, anywhere that would hire us, we'd play. I don't think there was a day in those three years when I wasn't drunk or high or both and by the end it had become obvious that belief on its own wasn't going to be enough. We'd need talent, too, and we were good, but not that good. At the start of 1980, Bon Scott, the lead singer from ACDC, died of alcohol poisoning and I took a step back and looked at my life. The drinking, the black outs, the complete lack of any future with the life I was currently leading ... I was turning into my father. So I quit the band and moved back to Fieldboro with a girl I'd been dating. One thing led to another and we got married on the eighth of December. When we got up the next morning and turned on the television, we heard that John Lennon had been assassinated.

I got married to the strains of Another One Bites the Dust and divorced to Thriller. Not literally obviously, even I'm not stupid enough to play that at my wedding.

You Hear The Door Slam  
And Realize There's Nowhere Left To Run  
You Feel The Cold Hand And Wonder If You'll Ever See The Sun  
You Close Your Eyes And Hope That This Is Just  
Imagination  
But All The While You Hear The Creature Creepin' Up  
Behind  
You're Out Of Time

I guess I'd been trying to pretend everything was all right. That if I just believed hard enough things would fix themselves. Then I came home early one night and found her curled up on the couch with her lover. So I packed and left. She got the house, I got the van and my drum kit. A few signatures on pieces of paper later and it was over, as if it had never been.

I drifted for a couple of years and then one day I walked through the doors of Empire Records and met a man called Jacob Beck. He was a good man who genuinely loved music of all kinds. He offered me a job and let me keep my kit at the store. It almost made up for the endless loop of Karma Chameleon, Wake Me Up Before You Go Go, and Like a Virgin. We thought we'd invented the teenager in the sixties but it seemed the eighties gave them money, spending power, and apparently absolutely no taste in music.

Things finally seemed to be on the up again. I had a job I mostly loved, put a down payment on a house, and met Lisa. She moved in and we started to build a life together. It was the year of the Live Aid concerts and Jacob set up a television in the store so people could watch them. The world seemed like it was slowly becoming a better place again and my life was finally fitting together. I started to believe again.

Then I caught this scrawny kid shoplifting. When I grabbed him he was nothing but skin and bone. I dragged him into the back room and watched him while Jacob went out and bought him something to eat. We sat with him and talked, about music mainly. Slowly we pieced together what had happened to him and instead of calling the police, I called a lawyer. It took sometime and a lot of paperwork, but eventually Lucas came home with me. Lucas moved in and Lisa moved out. She didn't want kids, especially not a sulky thirteen year old with a smart mouth. It seemed like a good trade. At the store it was a year of Madonna, the Bangles, George Michael and Whitney Houston. But at home we listened to ACDC, and when the first four Beatles albums were released on CD, I bought them and we listened together – it almost made up for endless hours of 'Walk Like an Egyptian' and 'Careless Whisper' at work.

The next year Jacob died. Lucas and I went to the funeral and I told him about my grandfather; I assured him it was all right to cry. Mitchell made me manager, which meant more paperwork, but at least it meant he wouldn't be selling the store immediately. I went home to Lucas and held him as he cried. We talked about Jacob, my grandfather, and Neil Armstrong. I told Lucas you just needed to have faith and anything was possible; he asked if that was true why Jacob had died. I didn't have an answer for him. The same year I got a call to say my father had died. I didn't go to that funeral. Just had my lawyer handle the will and sell his house. I'd said my goodbyes to him a long time ago; I didn't need to see a grave to do that. Instead I took Lucas to see them filming 'Big', watched as he became engrossed in the whole process, and prayed this didn't mean he was going to become an actor when he grew up. We went out for ice cream afterwards and he bounced and talked non-stop – I smiled and nodded and remembered acting the same way with grandfather after we saw Elvis.

Lucas stayed in school and graduated with his class. He came to work with me at the store full time and helped me recruit a gang of strays and freaks to work there. Berko reminds me a little of me, except he's more serious about his music and less caught up with everything that comes with it. Eddie's brownies are the closest he ever gets to drugs, unlike Corey. Damn, I should have seen that, seen the signs, but we all missed them. All of us except Lucas. Then Mitch gave me the Music Town proposal. I tried to raise the money, but I was coming up short. Until Lucas stepped in. He stole the money and took a chance and though it didn't pay off the gang all came together to fix things. They believed in the store, in me, and it seems they believed just hard enough to make it work.

Anything's possible if you believe. You just have to fight hard enough, not let the obstacles in your path stop you or divert you. Just like Lovell when I was a child and the whole world was watching with bated breath to see him bring his team home. Hearing a noise, I look over my shoulder and Lucas is standing in the doorway, smiling. I hold out my hand and he comes to join me, curling up against me on the seat. From inside I can hear the strains of ABBA on the stereo. When I came out it had been Better Than Ezra, but now it was ABBA. I could hear Gina and Corey singing along, they'd been itching to do that since the box set came out last week. I laugh and pull Lucas even closer. He looks up at me and I kiss him softly. Sighing happily, he snuggles closer and we join in, singing along to the well known words and just enjoying each other's company. I have a music store, a great group of friends to work with, and a beautiful young lover to go home with. I smile and kiss his hair. All you have to do is believe.


End file.
